Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Metropolitan Railway opened on the 10th of January 1863 as the world's first underground passenger railway. This initial line ran between Paddington and Farringdon using steam locomotives to pull wooden carriages through cut-and-cover tunnels.
Harry Beck created the diagrammatic tube map which appeared in 1933 when most underground railways merged to form the London Passenger Transport Board. The design became a national icon voted so in 2006 and remains an enduring symbol of the network.
A crush of people attempting to take shelter resulted in 173 deaths including 62 children during a test of air-raid warning sirens on the 3rd of March 1943. This event stands as the worst civilian disaster in Britain during the Second World War involving the London Underground system.
The Underground serves 272 stations today with eleven lines totaling miles of track making it the thirteenth longest metro system in the world. Five percent of the system runs on the surface while the rest consists of sub-surface tunnels or deep-level tube tunnels.
Electronic ticketing arrived with the Oyster card introduced in 2003 followed by contactless bank card payments in September 2014. Over 500 million journeys have taken place using contactless payments making Transport for London one of Europe's largest contactless merchants.